Connections

a story

by J. Orlin Grabbe

The data transmission came in late Friday
afternoon, time stamped 16:25:03. Two females
with possibly unaltered secondary sexual
characteristics were seen strolling on Chestnut.

Maybe I should have known something was
up when I walked out of the Bureau door and
spotted them right away, easy money, just across
the street. The breasts were unchanged, all right. I
had an instinct for that sort of thing. You had to, to
work for the Bureau. Well, there was no hurry. I
wasn't going to spoil the fun by making an on-the-
spot arrest. I would follow them, toy with them,
enjoy the sights.

That's what I liked about this job. Every day
held the possibility of seeing things most other
people just dreamed about. And they paid you well
for it. There was something else, too. But I can't go
into that. Major PR issue. Let's just say Bureau
personnel had to have special qualifications, which
granted them certain privileged exemptions.

I know the study of history isn't accepted
much anymore. About the Fallacy of Origins, and
all that. Let me tell you something anyway. They
gave us a class at the Bureau. The Prosthetic Organ
Movement, the instructor said, had its roots in two
turn-of-the-century phenomena. One was the AIDS
pandemic which had hit most sectors of most
societies by that time. The other was an upsurge of
religiosity which blamed it all on the sexual
impulse. Sex had created the crisis, in this view,
and the object was to get rid of both the disease-
transmitting sex organs and desire itself.

Early models were crude, barely functional,
and wired to avoid pleasure. They weren't much to
look at, either. But, to be sure, the artificial penises
wouldn't carry the AIDS virus nor would the
vaginas contract VD, and later on there were plastic
breasts that couldn't get cancer. Well, public
attitudes began to change only after the Social
Responsibility and Preservation of the Species Act
of '09, which made prosthetic sexual organs
mandatory. Religious fervor subsided. The
disappearance of disease allowed the return of
pleasure. And just as some vegetarians bought
vegetable sausages advertised as tasting like the real
thing, so more and more people patronized
biomedical establishments promising the capacity
for good old-fashioned sex, like their parents and
grandparents enjoyed. Manufacturers competed to
deliver the natural look and the natural feel. Not
that anyone knew what that looked or felt like
anymore.

Nice lecture, huh? I got the memory. More:
Now, today, there were some who wanted to take
the sexual reformation even further. The Bureau
was founded to counter the pernicious influence of
the Real Sex Movement, a monstrous group of
teenagers and adults who attempted to avoid the
surgery legally required at the age of puberty. If not
stopped, their hopelessly romantic notions of a
natural sex utopia would usher in a new era of death
and disease. Our mission was important, vital to the
survival of the human race.

I had to admit it, though. The job was fun. It
gave you that primitive feeling, out here on the
street, following two females with original sex
parts. It was exciting, kinky as it was. I followed
them into the crowded bar of a place called
Carolina's. One of them had short black hair that
curled in around her face. Not badly shaped, but a
bit thin for the current season. Not so the blonde.
She was a couple of inches taller and ripe in all the
right places.

I maneuvered my way up to the counter, so I
could hear what they were saying. It was difficult
not to appear obvious in the small room. By turning
slightly as I sipped my gin and tonic, I could look
down the neckline of the blonde's cream-colored
dress, and trace the curve of her breast almost to the
nipple. It was real, all right. I thought about her
other real parts.

The short one with dark hair was talking.
And let me tell you. This is really the way it
happened. I got the memory, you see. Make no
mistake. This is what Short-Dark said:

"There are these two sisters, see, Carol and
Joyce who always wear either red or black panties.
They start out in New York, and Carol flies to
London while Joyce goes to Los Angeles. Carol
then picks up this guy in a singles bar and takes him
back to her hotel. She removes her dress and the
guy observes she's wearing red panties. Instantly he
rushes to the phone and calls his friend in L.A., who
all this time has been with Joyce. The two of them
are laying in bed in post-coital bliss-out, and he
casts his gaze at the tangled clothes strewn across
the room, and sure enough, Joyce's panties are seen
laying over on the couch, and they're black.

"On another occasion Carol flies on to
Bangkok, while Joyce goes to Honolulu. The same
thing happens. Only this time Joyce's panties are
red, but Carol's are black. The key fact is that no
matter what color panties the first sister is wearing
when seen by a lover, the other sister is wearing the
opposite color."

I ordered myself another gin and tonic. I
sure liked the way these sex primitives talked.
Short-Dark kept at it:

"The question is, how did the observation of
the first sister's panties force the other sister's
underwear to have a different color? It proves that
information transfer is instantaneous. Or, as
physicists would say, that reality is non-local."

"Or that someone has a large phone bill,"
Blonde responded.

Short-Dark continued: "Non-local means
one thing here causes something else to happen over
there, with nothing in between. In physics, the
observation that the colors of the panties are always
different despite the displacement of the two sisters
in space is just one more illustration of the
Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky Paradox. It's similar to a
conceptual experiment Einstein used to show
quantum mechanics must be incomplete, because
otherwise information transfer would have to take
place instantaneously. That is, faster than the speed
of light, which Relativity said couldn't happen. The
only problem is that the experiment has now been
performed numerous times--using elementary
particles--and the panties are always of different
colors. So information does in effect travel faster
than the speed of light. Bell's Theorem implies the
blunt conclusion: reality is non-local."

"I tried phone sex once," Short-Dark replied,
"but the handset was the wrong shape and I never
got off. Another way to view Bell's Theorem is to
say that things that were once in contact are always
in contact. The two sisters are somehow always
connected, so that when observed jointly there is
always a single pair of red, and a single pair of
black, panties. Despite the fact that before the
observation of the first pair of panties, there is
probability one-half that either pair is red, and one-
half that either pair is black."

Blonde now appeared interested. "That
sounds like what Sir James Frazer in The Golden
Bough called the Law of Contagion. The law says
that things once in contact continue to influence
each other at a distance after physical contact has
been severed."

"Exactly. The information revolution leads
us back to magic."

"Praise the Lord and pass the amulets,"
Blonde said, raising her glass in a toast.

Well, I'll tell you, at this point I was thinking
to myself, Holy Horus. If I file a report on this
conversation, they'll throw me out of the office.
They'll say I made it up. On the other hand, it
would be a crime not to report anything I overheard.
That's strict Bureau policy. If I didn't report it, and
they discovered my omission, I would be booted
right out on the street. To be kicked out of the
Bureau would involve things too horrible to think
about. Things I can't tell you. You wouldn't want to
know, anyway. Holy Horus, like I said. And it got
worse.

"Thinking in terms of information
correlations leads to other weirdness. Like the
conclusion that space and time don't exist. Not in
the way we normally think," Short-Dark said.

"We think that City Hall is located over
THERE, at the corner of Broad and Market. That
the Philadelphia police bombed the M.O.V.E. house
THEN, on May 13, 1985. We say this is there.
Such and such happened then. But it's all nonsense.
The belief that the Universe is organized according
to space and time is a myth created by the human
mind."

Now we were getting somewhere. It could
be the name of a new radical group. M.O.V.E.
Hmm. The "O" and the "V" probably stood for
"Original Vagina". No telling about the "M" and
"E".

"Secretly we already know this. The clues
peek out at us every day, but we ignore them. One
day you read a magazine and come across a word,
say abstemious. It strikes you. You look it up in
the dictionary. Then a while later you turn on the
radio. You hear someone talking about 'abstemious
behavior'. For the next several days your friends
and neighbors, and people in the subway, suddenly
seem in love with 'abstemious'."

"One should never be abstemious with
love."

Blonde glanced up at in my direction as she
said this. Why was she looking at me? Why were
they talking like this? Maybe I should move back,
be a little less conspicuous. I was hoping they'd get
back to the panty discussion. That way I could just
skip the middle section of dialogue as unimportant
detail.

"Why?" Short-Dark ignored the interruption.
"What causes the word to suddenly pop out of the
woodwork everywhere you turn? There is no
causality involved. Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist,
and Carl Jung, the psychologist, called the
phenomena synchronicity. They referred to it as an
acausal connecting principal. They didn't explain it
very well, because information theory was still in its
infancy."

"Abstemious behavior is hard to explain."

Then it occurred to me. Maybe they were
both on drugs. Yeah. That would be a safe thing to
say in the report. On drugs and rambling
incoherently. What else would anyone expect of
primitives?

"The universe is really organized like an
information data bank. Suppose you want to do
research on a particular subject. You go to the
computer in a library and do a search over key
words. Up pops a list of journal articles all dealing
with that topic. The different articles don't cause
one another. They just all appear there in the list
because the computer has found they all deal with
the same thing. So when you focus on the word
abstemious in a magazine one day, it's as if you
send out a signal to the universe to do a data search
over 'abstemious'. You then receive back your list
in the form of a series of events in your life that
involve that word or theme.

"Some people experience synchronicity in
the form of numbers. One day the TV news reports
a train wreck. The number of the train is 79257. A
couple of days later the winning lottery number is
7925. Then you receive a letter from a forgotten
childhood friend. The Zip Code is 79275. And so
on."

I have to tell you. Short-Dark never stopped
talking. She could carry on some, that one.

"My mother once got a notice that the owner
of the apartment where she lived wanted it back and
that she had to move. That very evening she went
out to dinner, and while they were standing in the
entry way waiting for their table to be called, a
waiter came by and asked if she could 'move, just
for a minute.' Then they sat down and the couple at
the next table were talking about their upcoming
move to New York. She went home that night and
on the TV there was a late news report of a new
confrontation between the M.O.V.E. people and the
police, who wanted them to move out of a house."

Blonde looked directly at me. "It must have
been a moving experience," she said. I had a
feeling of panic. A distinct impression that they
knew all about me, and were just stringing me
along. Were they trying to set me up? How? I
looked at the bottles behind the bar and felt the
warmth on my forehead. Who were these females?

The pressure in my bladder suggested an
appropriate exit while I collected my thoughts. A
quiet piss to think things over. Yeah. Gather my
forces. And then go back out and bust those disease
bags. There was a flush on my face in the mirror.

They were still there when I returned.
Money and drink sitting in the same spot. Blonde
was speaking. Saying something.

"--thesis. If earth is evolving a nervous system,
the number of neurons is sufficient at around five
billion people."

They were silent for a minute. Then Short-
Dark spoke. "Well, I'll see you back at the
apartment. I have a few things to catch up on."

She picked up her purse and without further
preliminaries headed for the door. Yeah, I know
what you're thinking. I should have followed her.
And later trapped them both in their cave. But I
didn't. Something about Blonde told me to stay.
Blonde and her primitive sex organs.

Blonde glanced at me and then looked down
at her empty glass.

"Buy you a another drink?" I asked. And
don't get wise. I'll let you in on something. No
Bureau policy prohibited getting naked with
primitives. It was just the training program weeded
out people who would do something that stupid.
But. Well, you know. Sometimes you had to risk
your life in the line of duty. What the cop.

For a moment she didn't look up.

"I'm Craig," I said. She was making me
nervous.

Then I saw the rich blue, surrounding pupils
that were opened wide. Too wide, even for the
darkened room.

"Ishtar," she responded.

No telling what I would have thought or
done, normally. But I was looking into her eyes
then. Into the twin pools of moonlight. I felt a
preterhuman intelligence, ancient and terrible and
coming from afar.

"The first and the last." Her voice had
crawled inside my brain. "The one honored and
scorned. The whore who is holy. Wife and virgin
and lover, mother and sister and daughter."

I fell into the void. Yeah, yeah, don't bother.
How the cop do I know what was going on?

When I awoke I saw Short-Dark looking at
me. She was polishing the barrel of a Sig Sauer X-
2256 with an oil cloth. A clip of .3815 caliber
bullets lay on the bed beside her.

"We hauled you in for eavesdropping," she
said. "Data piracy has been a crime ever since HR
2366691, the Omnibus Crime Control and True
Love of the American Way Act of 1997."

"I was only having a drink," I said. Who
was she working for?

"We tested your memory banks and found
you had also received unauthorized visual
stimulation from parabolic parameters of my
friend's patented body architecture."

Well, true, so what? Could it be a copyright
infringement case? Maybe. Maybe they worked for
one of the corporations. Some of them had some
pretty tough security.

"What did she expect, dressed like that," I
said.

"What she expected was prompt payment of
the tab placed on the bar beside you. Since you in
fact chose to ignore it while lying on the floor in a
comatose state, we are exercising our right to public
seizure of all contraband items."

It was only then that I spotted the surgical
tools lying on a bed of gauze on a silver platter.

"This is entrapment," I roared in agony.

She nodded her approval: "Ah, now you
understand Bell's Theorem."

I was thinking fast, sweating. "Listen, I
work for the Bureau. If anything happens to me,
you're in trouble."

"The Bureau? Oh, you mean the SOPs, the
Sex Organ Police. Well, now, how fascinating.
Maybe you should arrest yourself."

"Listen. It's classified information. But
there's no point, now, not to tell you. We're allowed
to keep our natural organs. It imparts special
biological advantages in seeking out criminals and
violators. You've got to fight fire with fire."

"Do you now? Hmm. Well, without your
natural organs, what's to prove you work for the
Bureau? And don't expect them to waste effort on
your behalf. You'll be no good to them anymore."

Keep trying. "Look, before it happens. You
and me. It'll be real primitive. Two naturals
copping. Hey, what do you say?"

"Oh, listen to this! Don't you know that for
someone with natural organs to request sex of
another person is statutory attempted murder? The
list of charges gets longer and longer."

"I'd be dead anyway. Surely you can
understand. Someone like you. That's why I joined
the Bureau in the first place. I had met an operative
one time. Instinct told me she was still intact, still
had the real thing. That's why I joined. I couldn't
stand the idea of losing my own. I'd rather be
dead."

"How do you know you're not already?"

I was sweating now. Sure, I could feel the
blob. The dead zone in my groin. But the
anesthesia was pre-op, right? There was no way to
tell. Not tied down like this. Maybe she was
Bureau. Yeah, maybe. I had heard rumors of a
counter-intelligence division. But that was all
hush-hush. Maybe this was just some kind of test.
Yeah, maybe that's all it was. Maybe.